faux-chenille baby blanket

I’ve finally finished my faux-chenille baby blanket! A lot of love went into this project, from both myself and from Chris! No, not just ‘he worked for the money to buy the materials needed to…’ (; Chris put in more than his fair share of time on this project, cutting rows and rows and rows of lines to make the faux-chenille on the back.

This project was one of the main things I did to pass the time when I was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overdue with Olivia. Then it took me forever after she was born to get back into the sewing room to finish the binding. Finally I remembered that you don’t have to have time to finish a project to work on it when you have a craft room. It’s why you have a craft room. So nobody can touch your shit and you can just abandon it mid-project and come back to it next time you have five minutes to steal.
 So I ironed the fabric one day… cut the binding another… sewed the binding into a long strip… ironed it again… ironed it folded… and finally got to the part where I sewed it on! That took another two days, of course.

Above you can see the faux chenille on the back, which is created by sewing four fabrics together with approximatly one million tiny lines of quilting, and then cutting three of the four layers. When I read the tutorial for this over at Aesthetic Nest one of my first thoughts was actually something along the lines of “and Chris can help me with the cutting because he LOVES helping me with my sewing projects!” This may possibly be a slight exaggeration in my own mind, but he does enjoy helping me out with my little projects. So he logged in a few hours of cutting while watching Deadliest Catch on Netflix.

Can’t have a mini photo shoot without Nicole hopping in to say hi! Check out the difference in skin tones on these girls… Nicole has Chris’ skin tone, Olivia has mine. Pale delicate flowers that we are. Ha. (And Nicole, of course, can look out a window in spring and develop a suntan. And she still has a swimsuit tanline on her little bum, I noticed today. I lost my tanlines on… hmmm…. September 1st? Something like that?)

What I really love about this blanket is the more it is loved the more lovely the back will become. It will soften up more every time it goes through the wash and frays. I absolutely adore that about this project! This is the first time I’ve really done a project with ‘forever’ in mind and it makes me feel very happy to think that this blanket might someday be cherished and snuggled by Olivia’s own children, all soft and aged and cute. Bestill my heart. Perhaps there is a little bit of a romantic in me, after all.

I am still hemming and hawing over how much I like the binding. Instead of going with the thin binding, I used the Wide Binding Tutorial at Sew Dang Cute Crafts. Well, I sortof used it, I read it like sixty times and then did it off of my memory and did things a wee bit differently but it still worked out! Anyways, I thought the thick brown binding might ground the blanket a bit, but now I’m not sure if it looks good or if it wrecks it a bit. Feel free to weigh in, I’m not against ripping it off and sewing on a thin delicate pink or white binding instead! This is supposed to be an heirloom type project and I have logged so much time into it already, I don’t mind redoing that part to perfect it. Especially because I think it’s already showing that the binding was a cheaper fabric than the blanket itself. The binding color has been growing on me these last few days, but I’m still not sure. What do you all think?